Impact of Multi Sensory Appeals of Personal Care Brands on Brand Evangelism

Abstract

The behaviour of consumers in modern context has undergone a significant change where consumers have become more sensitive towards sensory appeals embedded with product brands. Consumers have become more conscious on what they purchase and pay a considerable amount of time in making purchase decisions. At the same time, human senses are played a powerful role in influencing emotions and perceptions of customers in their purchasing behaviour. As the main objective, this study was focused on identifying how multi-sensory appeals named touch, smell, sound, sight and taste embedded with personal care brands of Fast Moving Consumer Goods which stimulate human senses can be influenced on total behaviour of consumers which is known as Brand Evangelism. Reason for the selection of personal care category for the study is that, sensory touch points are more frequently used in personal care brands with compared to other categories such as food and home care. The findings of this study are crucial for Fast Moving Consumer Goods businesses in determining the relationship between multi-sensory appeals with brand evangelism. Quantitative research was chosen as the research design where multi stage cluster sampling was used to draw sample from the population. Sample was consisted with respondents who purchase or consume personal care products under the categories of skin care, hair care and oral care. Higher number of customers who use or purchase personal care brands are heavily located in western province rather than other provinces in Sri Lanka. By taking this aspect in to consideration, clusters were selected based on population variances among personal care brand usage and appropriate weightage were given to select the sample from clusters. Moreover, structured questionnaires were distributed among the sample in order to collect data for analysis. Impact of multi-sensory appeals of personal care brands on brand evangelism has been analysed through this research study. Findings discovered that there is a strong positive relationship between multi-sensory appeals such as Sight, Smell and Taste with brand evangelism in personal care category. Further, Brand love has played the mediating role between multi-sensory factors and brand evangelism. Based on findings, it is recommended to keep focus on sight, smell and taste when developing product features and attributes such as ingredients, design and packaging in personal care brands. This is useful in managerial decision making at the point of product development where attention can be narrowed down to prominent sensory appeals rather than focusing on all the sensory elements at the same time.